No more exits: The $77B “hard maturity” wall hitting CMBS

Commercial mortgage-backed securities borrowers are running out of runway.

After several years of extensions, 2026 is shaping up to be the year that many loans hit a hard stop. Roughly $76.6 billion worth of debt faces hard deadlines, meaning that borrowers have no contractual options left to push out their due dates, according to a new report from research firm Trepp. The firm notes that hard maturities can also include loans that never had any extension options, but Trepp focused on loans whose borrowers have already used up all extensions. These are loans that are truly at distress.

That wall is taller than it has been in recent years.  

In 2024, nearly $38 billion worth of CMBS loans reached hard maturity — about 44 percent of all loans that were due, according to Trepp. Of those, $12.3 billion remains unpaid, with two-thirds of those loans characterized as non-performing, or significantly past due.

The picture didn’t improve much in 2025. About $44 billion worth of loans had no extension options, representing about 51 percent of maturing loans due last year, Trepp found. Some $11 billion worth of those loans have not been repaid, and 45 percent are significantly overdue.

This year brings an even larger cohort and a more fragile refinancing environment.

More than a third (36 percent) of this year’s hard-maturity loans carry debt yields at or below 8 percent, meaning they will be more difficult to refinance in today’s rate environment. That represents a shift from 2024 and 2025, where many of the loans that went unpaid had yields of 9 percent and under, which lenders see as less risky.

Over the past several years, the office sector has been the focus of troubled loans. That remains true this year, but another sector has been added to the watch list.

Lodging loans now account for the largest share of hard maturities at 20.5 percent, narrowly edging out office at just 20.1 percent. 

Lodging debt, however, carries the highest weighted-average debt yield of the loans in hard maturity, 12.93 percent, per Trepp, compared to 10.71 percent for office. The lowest average was with multifamily debt, which came in at 8.14 percent.